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Fine, okay, there were some bits that are never fun. Like building an ebook table of contents or going through a bunch of stories written in standard manuscript format and deleting all the tabs so they won’t screw up the ebook.

But yeah, I liked it. There are 21 science fiction stories in there, arranged roughly from the nearest future to the most distant. From the most plausible to the most conjectural. From the least to the most alien-to-us-today vision of humanity.

There are self-driving cars and artificial intelligences in love and undersea civilizations and killer climate change and all sorts of other good stuff.

Yes, this one is about acquiring an archaic skill that nobody needs — driving an uncomputerized car in a time when cars not only drive themselves, but have no user-accessible steering wheel, accelerator, brake, not even a switch for the headlights. Where your car not only drives you, but it also comes to your side when you call — literally.

Stories that simple are never that simple, and there’s a lot more than that to this novelette — which, by the way, is available as preorder until its 27th July 2016 release, and of course as an instant purchase after that at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, and Google Play Books.

It’s about learning to see past the context of your time and place in history, learning to see what in your society helps and what holds you back, about a woman going hand-to-hand with caveman tech just to see if she can.

I also wrote a short description that appears where it is sold: “Angela’s world is automated — the cars drive themselves. Houses and tablets and phones are always listening to tell you how to do things and warn you against things you’re not supposed to do. When she and her boyfriend inherit an old-style manual-drive car, it inspires her to try to master it — and to realize how little a person actually controls in a technological,automated world.”

And I think you should buy a copy because I enjoyed the hell out of finishing it and loved seeing how it ended — I think that enjoyment and love shines through in the finished product.

Thanks.

[Also, just so you know, over on Patreon my patrons got a free copy a few days ago (and you can still get one by becoming a patron and scrolling down to the post and downloading your preferred format) — not only did they not have to wait for the preorder to release, but they also didn’t have to pay. Good deal, no?]

…or at least the happy little solarpunk short-short they star in is free!

I have often said that I hope that someone — anyone, government or private or whatever — builds a really decent retirement home on the moon or in geosynchronous orbit or at L5 in time for me to retire to it.

This is a story about two people who are retiring to just that sort of place. It’s a good idea for a few reasons — the reduced ‘gravity’ of a spinning habitat or the real low-gee of the moon may be enough to avoid the health troubles of microgravity while also avoiding the health troubles of living in full Earth gravity as an elder. Good times!

In the story, Brittany is happy to move to orbit. Dustin, however, is really unhappy at the idea of leaving Earth behind forever. Resolving that conflict forms the base of this happy little story.

Give it a peep — because it is FREE, and because my career as an author is still getting off the ground and every single one of you who reads it increases my chances of being seen by new readers by making my work more visible to everyone.

Your support is VERY MUCH appreciated! (If you’d like to lend even more support, I’m on Patreon, too)

No, it’s not. My name isn’t Gerald, of course. But my newest short story, My Name Is Gerald, is now available.

Here’s the blurb:

Gerald is a lonely man, a shut-in who spends his time dreaming and watching the skies over his rural Nebraska hometown on the eve of the quincentennial. What he observes in those skies may lead him to find his own freedom… or into a new captivity.

My Name Is Gerald is a short story of about 5300 words.

If you backtrack a little, you’ll find my previous two blog entries have been about this story. One of those two contains an excerpt from the rough draft, which made it into the final version with only a little editing.

Here’s where you can find it. Updates will be added as it is distributed to the various major ebook sellers.

So, one of my ebooks has broken the top 100,000 on Amazon with a sales rank somewhere around 85,000.

Usually, authors don’t regale you with tales of their sales until they’re on the NYT bestsellers list or they can tell you they’re number one.

But I’m starting from zero, and although I’m not naive enough to think that breaking 100K on Amazon is a ticket to the big time, I am hopeful enough to think that it might be the start of bigger and better things.

Now, usually my reaction to a itty bitty sign of success, be it the growing sales rank of a story I like very much, or something else like the first radish shoots of the season in my garden, is not immediately joy as you might think. My first reaction is impatience, which I think is a very Murican reaction. I’ve grown to recognize this reaction as not such a good thing, as overdramatic and melodramatic. So when I looked and saw this story gaining traction and starting to sell faster than my others, I took that impatience, told it to please be quiet and go sit down, and wrote a blog post instead.

A better reaction to a bit of positive news is a smile. Writing a couple of hundred words about it has helped me to smile instead of complain.

Edit 2/2/13: My, ratings can shift quickly. Out of the Cold has dipped back below the 100,000 ranking. It was fun while it lasted; we’ll see if it isn’t back up in the ratings soon. My bet is that it will be.

Today, the proof copies of my Hunger anthology arrived. It is, of course, still available in ebook form from just about any of the links to the right of this post with the possible exception of Collins Booksellers of Australia which seems to have to wait a bit longer than the others for new titles.

But that’s not the point. This is the first time I have held a physical book with my name on it as author.

Feels good, man.

Barring any major problems—and I haven’t found one yet—it should be available from Createspace in a few days and from Amazon about a week after that.

If you choose to read it, ebook or traditional hard copy, I hope you enjoy it. I know I have enjoyed creating it and putting it out there.

Bullets for Buddha has been on Amazon since February 2012. 75% of the copies that have sold there have been sold in the last 3 weeks. I’m not sure why. Is is just because the word ‘bullet’ and the word ‘Buddha’ really don’t go together, so it makes people look twice?

Of course, I’m selling nowhere near 1% of what 50 Shades has sold. I must resist the temptation to write 50 Shades of Gautama. I mean, I do like money. On the other hand, I also like to sleep at night. Don’t get me wrong, my goal is to sell my stories; that means my goal is to write things that people will enjoy reading. I don’t think I would enjoy writing 50 Shades of Gautama. The bottom line there isn’t so much ‘artistic integrity’, whatever that means, but that if I’m not enjoying writing, it’s probably going to show in my writing and then you won’t enjoy reading it.

I don’t mean to say that I think I need to be in a rapture of joy every second that I’m writing. Sometimes I’m tired and I don’t really want to write, but I know I need to forge ahead and make some progress. Sometimes I’m at an awkward spot where I don’t quite know where to take the story I’m writing, and the feeling of being stalled— or of writing a few hundred words and deciding that they’re not the right words and deleting them— isn’t much fun.

I mean I have to like what I’m writing to some degree, or it’s going to be crappy. Just that simple.

Maybe those sudden sales are because a couple of people stumbled across it, and they like what they saw. That sounds good to me, and I think it’s a good story.